He and fellow British writers such as Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean set conventions for the genre: a tough, resourceful, but essentially ordinary hero pitted against villains determined to sow destruction and chaos for their own ends.
[1] Bagley left England in 1947 for Africa and worked his way overland, crossing the Sahara Desert and briefly settling in Kampala, Uganda, where he contracted malaria.
By 1951, he had settled in South Africa, working in the gold mining and asbestos industries in Durban, Natal, before becoming a freelance writer for local newspapers and magazines.
In an afterword to his novel Windfall, Bagley describes how as a freelancer for the Johannesburg Sunday Times, he witnessed the 1960 assassination attempt against South African PM Hendrik Verwoerd.
When not travelling to research the exotic backgrounds for his novels, Bagley enjoyed sailing, loved classical music, films and military history, and played war games.
Exceptions include Max Stafford (a security consultant featured in Flyaway and Windfall), Slade (a spy who appeared in Running Blind and The Freedom Trap), and Metcalfe (a smuggler/mercenary in The Golden Keel and The Spoilers).
In 2017, an unpublished first-draft manuscript entitled Because Salton Died was discovered among his papers at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center[4] in Boston, Massachusetts.
[7] At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2022, HarperCollins announced they had acquired Bagley's catalogue from Brockhurst Publications, which had previously been responsible for managing the author's estate.